Ethereum

Does anyone here run a full node that isn't also a staking validator?

Just looking to see if this is a thing people do at all, as opposed to relying on third-party trusted full nodes over RPC.

Wannabe contributor for /walletbeat.

Censorship resistance requires privacy.

i ran several full nodes for work (only infra eng @ mint.fun) but it was very labor intensive, especially for just 1 eng on call 24x7

the geth node was nice and quiet, easy to run, but L2 (opstack) was an absolute mess, regular db corruptions, hard or impossible to take online backups, and could take months to sync a new one

they crashed somewhat regularly under heavy rpc traffic, it was my biggest problem at work, i tangled with it for several months (moving to k8s and building a backup strategy etc) before we finally decided to switch to a 3rd party rpc

L1 shouldn't get any heavier or harder to run, L2 is a cautionary tale imho. the whole stack is far too operationally intensive.